Saudi king appoints first female minister

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has appointed the first female minister in the kingdom's history.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia may be trying to strengthen alliances with reformersPhoto: AP

By David Blair in Cairo

2:51PM GMT 15 Feb 2009

He also sought to identify himself with his country's reformers by sacking two notorious hardliners at the weekend.

Any changes in high level appointments are exceptionally rare in Saudi Arabia where the foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, has been in office since 1975, and the defence minister, Crown Prince Sultan, has held his job since 1964.

This renders any reshuffle a bold step and the first shakeup of King Abdullah's reign was intended to send a message of reform.

Norah al-Faiz, an American-educated official, has become the first woman ever to enter the governing elite in a kingdom where women are not even permitted to drive.

"This is a successful step. We've always suffered from having a man occupy the position," she told the Saudi newspaper Arab News after her appointment as deputy education minister with special responsibility for female education.

She added: "A woman knows what problems and challenges her peers face. It's a change for the better."

King Abdullah also sacked two conservative figures, both of them deeply unpopular. Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ghaith, the head of the "Mutawwa", or religious police who routinely bully and intimidate citizens as they pursue their task of "promoting virtue and preventing vice", has been dismissed.

So has Sheikh Salih Ibn al-Luhaydan, the head of the Saudi judiciary, who declared last year that owners of satellite channels transmitting material which he deemed "immoral" could legally be murdered.

King Abdullah has also changed the head of the Saudi central bank and made a string of appointments elsewhere in the judiciary. The King, who is believed to be 84 or 85, is seen as the first Saudi monarch with genuine sympathy for social reform.

As his reign may be relatively short, he is taking the opportunity to remove hardliners and install more liberal figures.

The kingdom's official press stressed the importance of the reshuffle, with Arab News saying that it was not merely a "changing of the guard" and amounted to a "major transformation". However, a powerful lobby of religious conservatives, who have allies in the highest levels of the royal family, are likely to resist any major steps along the path to liberalisation. Their obstructionism will outlast King Abdullah's reign.